Tie-Ins

The BBC is adapting Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle into a four part miniseries. Ridley Scott will direct the four one-hour episodes.

Scott is a veteran in working with Dick’s texts. He also directed the 1982 acclaimed film Blade Runner, which was an adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The above video shows the trailer from Blade Runner, a film worth adding to your literary Netflix cue.

The New Yorker has more: “’Castle’ is to be a BBC production, so you know it’ll be intelligent, literate (Howard Brenton is writing the script), and disinclined to bore us with pointless, generic shoot-em-ups.”

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Sesame Workshop and Impelsys have teamed up to build the brand new Sesame Street eBookstore. For an annual subscription fee of $39.99, parents and children can have unlimited access to more than 100 Sesame Street eBooks.

Until July 4, 2010, the yearly subscription rate is offered at a special $24.99 rate. Books include: Elmo’s ABC Book and Grover’s Guide to Good Eating. The company has developed simple eBooks, narrated audio eBooks with music and sounds, and a number of animated and interactive titles. The books are categorized into 19 subject areas including: “letters, numbers, counting, colors, and cultural appreciation.” A rotating cast of five eBooks will be available for free at this site.

Scott Chambers, the senior VP of worldwide media distribution at Sesame Workshop, commented: “There is a new generation of readers that is moving toward electronic devices in order to access news, information and books, and we want to deliver our content to young readers in the formats they are engaging with on a daily basis … the debut of the eBookstore is an important step forward in bringing our 40-year library of children’s books to the next generation of young readers.”

We can talk about the magical promise of enhanced eBooks all day, but they won’t work unless publishers connect with quality partners. It’s time to reach out to the strange and talented world of H.P. Lovecraft fans.

Last night, this editor was watching the excellent film, The Call of Cthulhu. Created by the loving fans at H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS), these artists imagined how a silent film director would have adapted Lovecraft’s classic novel in the 1920s.

When the iPad and other tablet computers are more integrated into our reading experience, this editor hopes publishers can team up with creators like the HPLHS to create multimedia packages–bundling this movie with the Lovecraft eBook. In the meantime, you can stream the movie at Netflix and check out the book here.

Here’s more about the film: “a dying professor leaves his great-nephew a collection of documents pertaining to the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew begins to learn why the study of the cult so fascinated his grandfather. Bit-by-bit he begins piecing together the dread implications of his grandfather’s inquiries, and soon he takes on investigating the Cthulhu cult as a crusade of his own. As he pieces together the dreadful and disturbing reality of the situation, his own sanity begins to crumble.”

“We need new revenue streams,” said publisher of the Random House Publishing GroupGina Centrello to The Wall Street Journal in an article about the publishers plans to create books based on popular video games and to shop story lines to video game developers.

Random House is apparently shopping two such story lines around already, “one a fantasy adventure and the other a horror thriller. Each of the proposed games has a cast of characters, suggested stories, and an analysis of the type of gamer in mind,” according to the WSJ.

The article also reports that 15 RH employees are involved in this new effort, many with prior video game experience. Hmmm. These crazy publishers are getting into all kinds of new things. Next thing you know, HarperCollins will offer to come over and cook dinner.

A while back we reported on a forthcoming video game based on Dante’s Inferno. Well, that game has come forth. Electronic Arts released Dante’s ‘Inferno yesterday, and today NPR did a nice little piece on it.

Just like in Dante’s famous poem, the character of Dante in the video game slashes his way through nine levels of hell, killing sinners’ souls on his way to saving his lost love Beatrice. Except in the poem, Dante doesn’t kill so much as have depressing conversations in terza rima (the poetic form in which the whole long poem is set).

This is just such a cool–and/or awful–idea that we just had to cover it again. What other classic books would you like to see turned into violent video games? Maybe ‘Tom Sawyer: Grand Theft Raft’.

[Image: Electronic Arts]

Ever wanted to make your way through Dante’s circles of Hell on your Playstation rather than read a dumb old book? Or have you ever wished you had an epic poem to read instead of having to play a frustrating video game? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’re in luck.

Not only has Electronic Arts created a video game based on Dante’s Inferno, but, on January 19th, the Del Ray imprint of Random House will release a special tie-in edition of Dante’s epic poem, The Inferno, to coincide with the game’s release (which actually won’t happen until February 9).

The tie-in edition will feature an intro by the game’s Executive Producer, Jonathan Knight. Here’s a little sample, as quoted on the video game blog Kombo: “We are so grateful to have the opportunity to work with Random House on this project. Through the creative process of developing this game, we have grown quite close to the literary works of Dante Alighieri. It is his vision that we are adapting for this new media, and new audience. The game is a celebration of Dante, and we hope gamers will be encouraged to go beyond the game and explore the classic text that has inspired us so deeply.”

If only Dante had lived to see this day. He would be so psyched.